3 ms·

Couple of things: 1) Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both. 2) It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead of

Couple of things: 1) Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both. 2) It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)). All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy.

sitkack 2y ago
Thank you for the call out. I'd say the Sackler's committed premeditated violent crime, "at scale". One could even argue that they would be eligible for the death penalty and yet they keep half the winnings.
runarberg 2y ago
Here is the official statistic for federal inmates: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... To summarize, 44% of current federal inmates are there for drug-charges. The second most category is weapons charges at 22%. So a good 2/3 of current federal inmates are there for non-violent crimes. Sex offense is third most common at 13% I’m sure many are there for illegal sex work or consumption rather than for sexual violence. A whopping 4.6% is in federal prison for immigrating (which isn’t even a crime; unless this category includes human trafficking, which I would call a violent crime). EDIT: As for all US prisoners, here is the data I found (see table 16 on page 29): 62% are there for violent crimes and 12.5% for drug charges. Note that many large states—such as California—don’t imprison for drug possession any more, and this table does not include sentences shorter than 1 year. This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing, as most crimes have shorter sentencing but serious and especially violent crimes have longer sentencing and thus are over-represented among the current prison population at any one point in time. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdf
- philwelch 2y ago
  > Here is the official statistic for federal inmates Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails. > This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts, given that we're several comments deep into a thread which started with the claim that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal".
  - runarberg 2y ago
    > This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts. This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context. Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost, and it was placed on a demonstrably biased spot. Moving the goalpost away from a biased spot is not a logical fallacy, it is a correction.
    - philwelch 2y ago
      > Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost This is false. This is the ancestor comment that set the goalpost with the statement that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal". Neither that comment nor any of its ancestors were mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705 And it's rather rich of you to accuse me of dishonesty when you're the one providing misleading and unrepresentative statistics by focusing on federal inmates in particular.
philwelch 2y ago
> Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both. I'm talking about both, but here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html > It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)). From the above source, within state prisons (which is the majority of incarcerated Americans), 163,000 are serving sentences for murder, 168,000 for rape, 128,000 for robbery and 154,000 for assault. So technically I should have led off with rape instead of murder; my bad. You are technically correct that assault doesn't require the victim and perpetrator to make contact. For instance, pointing a loaded gun at somebody (outside of self defense) is considered aggravated assault. On the other hand, many states do not actually have separate assault and battery statutes, and the two seem to be classified together under "assault". Conversely, robbery and burglary are separated (burglary is categorized as a property crime rather than a violent crime). In addition to the 128,000 prisoners convicted of robbery, there are another 79,000 who were convicted of burglary. > All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy. The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019, neither of which took place inside US jurisdiction but let's set that aside for the sake of argument. Chicago alone had 592 homicides in 2018, 521 in 2019, 798 in 2020, 856 in 2021, 738 in 2022, 648 in 2023, and 312 year-to-date, (source: heyjackass.com) nearly all of which were committed by the sort of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells who sometimes end up getting mass-incarcerated. You tell me which is the bigger problem. Personally I wouldn't mind a legal system in which someone at Boeing could be held criminally liable for manslaughter (which accounts for another 20,000 state-level inmates in the United States), but I don't think Boeing's planes are a statistically significant cause of wrongful death.
- underlipton 2y ago

sitkack 2y ago

Thank you for the call out. I'd say the Sackler's committed premeditated violent crime, "at scale". One could even argue that they would be eligible for the death penalty and yet they keep half the winnings.

runarberg 2y ago

Here is the official statistic for federal inmates: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... To summarize, 44% of current federal inmates are there for drug-charges. The second most category is weapons charges at 22%. So a good 2/3 of current federal inmates are there for non-violent crimes. Sex offense is third most common at 13% I’m sure many are there for illegal sex work or consumption rather than for sexual violence. A whopping 4.6% is in federal prison for immigrating (which isn’t even a crime; unless this category includes human trafficking, which I would call a violent crime). EDIT: As for all US prisoners, here is the data I found (see table 16 on page 29): 62% are there for violent crimes and 12.5% for drug charges. Note that many large states—such as California—don’t imprison for drug possession any more, and this table does not include sentences shorter than 1 year. This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing, as most crimes have shorter sentencing but serious and especially violent crimes have longer sentencing and thus are over-represented among the current prison population at any one point in time. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdf

philwelch 2y ago
> Here is the official statistic for federal inmates Federal inmates are a tiny minority of inmates in the United States, because the vast majority of crimes are prosecuted at the state level. There are about 147,000 convicted federal inmates compared to over a million held in state prisons and 103,000 convicts held in local jails. > This methodology of counting current prison population is biased for more serious crimes with longer sentencing This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts, given that we're several comments deep into a thread which started with the claim that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal".
- runarberg 2y ago
  > This strikes me as an attempt to move the goalposts. This is HN, threads are supposed to get more interesting as they get longer. I was simply expending on my parent’s point by providing the data which was lacking, and my editorialization was to provide the necessary context. Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost, and it was placed on a demonstrably biased spot. Moving the goalpost away from a biased spot is not a logical fallacy, it is a correction.
  - philwelch 2y ago
    > Edit (re: move the goalpost): If you want to play fallacy bingo, then you were the one that actually placed the goalpost This is false. This is the ancestor comment that set the goalpost with the statement that "95% of US inmates are on plea deal". Neither that comment nor any of its ancestors were mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906705 And it's rather rich of you to accuse me of dishonesty when you're the one providing misleading and unrepresentative statistics by focusing on federal inmates in particular.

philwelch 2y ago

> Citation needed. Particularly if you're talking about federal inmates, state, or both. I'm talking about both, but here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html > It's disingenuous (re: primacy bias) to lead off with murder and rape, which account for a far smaller portion of "violent" crime than robbery (which I assume includes burglary, in which the victim and perpetrator don't make contact) and assault (which, again, does not require the victim and perpetrator to physically make contact (that's battery)). From the above source, within state prisons (which is the majority of incarcerated Americans), 163,000 are serving sentences for murder, 168,000 for rape, 128,000 for robbery and 154,000 for assault. So technically I should have led off with rape instead of murder; my bad. You are technically correct that assault doesn't require the victim and perpetrator to make contact. For instance, pointing a loaded gun at somebody (outside of self defense) is considered aggravated assault. On the other hand, many states do not actually have separate assault and battery statutes, and the two seem to be classified together under "assault". Conversely, robbery and burglary are separated (burglary is categorized as a property crime rather than a violent crime). In addition to the 128,000 prisoners convicted of robbery, there are another 79,000 who were convicted of burglary. > All of this is aside fact that an individual who allegedly commits a heinous act against another person or small group of people is in a completely different class from a large corporation whose products put millions at risk (and the executives and managers who sign off on those company's decisions). There is quite the destructive myopia behind the increasingly punitive (rather than rehabilitative) nature of incarceration for the former, when the latter get off so easy. The 737 Max has caused a total of 346 fatalities in two crashes taking place in 2018 and 2019, neither of which took place inside US jurisdiction but let's set that aside for the sake of argument. Chicago alone had 592 homicides in 2018, 521 in 2019, 798 in 2020, 856 in 2021, 738 in 2022, 648 in 2023, and 312 year-to-date, (source: heyjackass.com) nearly all of which were committed by the sort of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells who sometimes end up getting mass-incarcerated. You tell me which is the bigger problem. Personally I wouldn't mind a legal system in which someone at Boeing could be held criminally liable for manslaughter (which accounts for another 20,000 state-level inmates in the United States), but I don't think Boeing's planes are a statistically significant cause of wrongful death.

underlipton 2y ago